Sermon - God and Mammon

Sadly, I wasn't systematic enough to put the date on the typescripts of the sermons that I preached at Christ Church. However the first paragraph makes it clear that this was the second sermon that I preached there and that it must therefore have been in 1998. The final paragraph makes it clear that the occasion was just two Sundays before Easter.

It was, I think, possibly my most controversial sermon. However, nobody stamped out of the church in a huff, certainly nobody fell asleep while I was delivering it; and I was invited back again!

God and Mammon

When I last stood here, on Remembrance Sunday, I said that the Scriptures offered us, among many other things, a vision of a world in which men and women of every race and nation lived together in harmony with each other and with nature; the fulfilment of our prayer 'Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven'. This vision, I said, came from God, but since God has given us the gift of free will, it was we who to realize it.

A survey of today's world shows all too clearly how little progress has been made towards that realization. It was nearly three thousand years ago that the prophets Micah and Isaiah looked forward to swords being beaten into plough shares and spears into pruning hooks. Sadly, it hasn't yet happened. Perhaps, if they lived today, those prophets would be looking forward to Trident nuclear submarines being transformed into children's hospitals and Eurofighters into life support systems.

One reason why we have made so little progress towards the Kingdom of Heaven on earth promised by the Hebrew prophets and by the writers of the New Testament, has been the conflicting demands of another world faith, a faith that is profoundly opposed to Christianity and is, so I believe, no less opposed to the principles of the other world religions.

This antichristian creed is faith in material possessions. Some may prefer to call it avarice, or wealth acquisition, or materialism or simply greed. I think that there is a lot to be said for personifying it as the worship or service of Mammon, the ancient false god of material wealth.

Jesus did this, when in the Sermon on the Mount, he told his followers that they couldn't serve both God and Mammon. No man can serve two masters. John Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost made Mammon one of the fallen angels. With somewhat uncharacteristic humour, he wrote that Mammon was 'the least erect of all the spirits who fell from Heaven', because even in Heaven, he had spent his time bent over, admiring the golden pavements.

I believe that it was in the person of Mammon that the Devil tempted Jesus by offering him, 'All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them'. That was the final temptation and the one that Jesus rejected in the strongest terms: 'Get thee hence Satan'.

The Devil, in the person of Mammon, tempts us in the same way – though he doesn't offer us 'all the kingdoms of the world'. He thinks that we can be bought much more cheaply. Let us pray that we may always have the strength to prove him wrong.

Mammon has had his servants on earth since time began. I am inclined to think though that he has never before had quite so many devoted followers as he has today. Nor have they ever before been able to do quite so much harm to God's Earth and God's people.

Long ago, I read a science fiction novel set in a future in which space ships travelled continuously throughout our galaxy. The crews of these space ships had their own organisation with its own hymn or anthem. I have long forgotten the name of the book and that of its author. However, the final verse of that anthem has stuck in my memory:

So grant me one last landing

On the globe that gave me birth.

Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies

And the cool green hills of earth

.

Today I ask myself – for how much longer will the earth continue to have fleecy skies and cool green hills?

Already the service of Mammon is destroying the protective ozone layer in the earth's stratosphere so that our children can no longer play safely in God's sunshine as we could when I was a child. That same service is binging about climatic change that will flood vast areas of the earth's surface and render others arid deserts.

It is the servants of Mammon who destroy the rain forests, who deplete and poison the oceans and pollute the atmosphere. It is in the service of Mammon that we manufacture armaments, the means of death and destruction to our fellow men and women and distribute them throughout the world.

Nor must we overlook the harm that the service of Mammon does to the human spirit. Have you noticed how nowadays every human institution has been given the status of a market stall, and every human activity has become a marketable commodity, with a price to be haggled over?

Working men and women have become units of 'human resources'. In Clacton's Safeways Supermarket you'll find that job seekers are no longer directed, as they once would have been, to the Staff Manager but to the Human Resources Manager. In the careers pages of the broadsheets they no longer advertise for Personnel Managers but for Directors of Human Resources.

Human Resources! That effectively puts men and women, whom we Christians believe to have been created in the image of God, on the same level as barrels of oil, baulks of timber and tins of beans!

Sometimes, just like barrels of oil and baulks of timber, human resources become surplus to requirements; surplus to Mammon's requirements though never to those of God. They are cast into the set-aside army of unemployed – or job seekers as we are now supposed to call them.

It is good to know that the numbers of unemployed are steadily falling though, even by the most optimistic estimates, there are still well over a million of them – a number that, even as recently as twenty years ago, would have been considered to be quite unacceptable.

Should here be any at all? Our country desperately needs more doctors, nurses and carers. We need more police, both men and women, more security guards, more people to clear up the litter on our streets. We need, as once we had, conductors on our buses and porters on our railway stations.

But to employ anyone beyond the strict dictates of cost efficiency would be an affront to Mammon. Mammon's servants cannot endure the thought of paying a proper wage to someone who is doing a useful, perhaps even vital, job that is not, strictly speaking, profitable. Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness are the three persons of Mammon's Unholy Trinity.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there is vandalism and violent crime on our streets, that there is corruption and sleaze in high places, that our national press becomes daily grubbier, and that many of our fellow men and women, our brothers and sisters in Christ, beg for a living and sleep in shop doorways and cardboard boxes, while others flaunt the superfluity of their wealth

During the first decade of the 19

th

century, William Wordsworth wrote, 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee'. Today, as the twentieth century draws to its close, not just England but the whole world has need of a new Milton, a new Blake, perhaps a new Prophet Jeremiah, to engage the forces of Mammon and point us towards the promised land.

But of course, there is no new Milton, no latter-day Jeremiah. God has to make do with us to fulfil his purposes on earth. We must proclaim in our churches, in our political parties and trade unions, in conversations with friends and acquaintances, and in letters to the news media, that co-operation, love, trust and friendship must and will triumph over cut-throat competition, suspicion, enmity and greed.

Proclaiming this is the easy part of our task. On Remembrance Sunday I quoted George Bernard Shaw's contention that our faith does not consist of the things we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.

I do not find it easy to translate those principles that I have just proclaimed into assumptions on which I habitually act. George Fox, who founded the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) of which I am a member, told his followers, 'Be patterns, be examples', wherever you may find yourselves and then, he said, but only then, you will walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone.

It is a daunting task that faces us, but it is by no means a hopeless one. Experience has shown that when changes in human attitudes and in social and economic circumstances take place they do so with what, in retrospect, seems to be extraordinary rapidity.

I was born in 1921. Who, in that year, or indeed at any time throughout my childhood and youth, would have dreamed that by the time I was middle aged, the British Empire, the Empire on which the sun never set, would have disappeared – and that most people would consider that to be a good thing?

When I was middle-aged, in the 1970s, who would have expected me to see the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the installation of Nelson Mandela as President of a multiracial and democratic South Africa?

Perhaps the days of Mammon's Empire too, are numbered. Who knows what wind of change, what tide of spiritual evolution or revolution, may even now be gathering strength out there in the world?

For while the tired waves vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain;

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main

As we survey the cynicism, the materialism and the cruelty of today's world, it would be astonishing if we did not sometimes despair. On such occasions it is worth remembering that it was out of the despair of the young George Fox with the churches and human institutions of his day that he discovered the truth on which the Religious Society of Friends is founded. When he was at his lowest ebb he heard a voice that proclaimed, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition!' and then, as he recorded in his journal, his heart leapt with joy.

Later in his life, George Fox experienced a vision of an ocean of darkness, despair and death that was overcome by an even greater ocean of light and love.

Few of us these days are given to visions of that kind. However in the eye of my imagination, I too can see a great ocean of darkness surrounding us – but it is an ocean that is punctuated by countless millions of tiny sparks of light. They are the light of Christ shining in the hearts of every single man, woman and child in the world.

As St John tells us in that wonderful introduction to his Gospel: 'He is the true light that lighteth everyone who comes into the world'.

'Seek and ye shall find', said Jesus. If we look we can see evidence of that true light at work in the world today.

My wife and I frequently watch the children's and young people's programmes on BBC tv. We have seen evidence of the universal light of Christ in the efforts of children throughout the UK and beyond, in raising over a million and a half pounds during the past four months to help young sufferers from cystic fibrosis. We have seen it too, in the eagerness with which young people, inspired by Children's Newsround , have prepared video films to raise awareness of the plight of homeless street children in Latin America and Asia.

Nor should we forget the world-wide revulsion against antipersonnel landmines triggered by Princess Diana's support for the Red Cross Society's anti-landmine campaign, and the great wave of compassion and generosity both in this country and overseas that arose in the wake of the princess's tragic death.

We must be of good cheer. Good

will

triumph over evil – and is already doing so in the world today. In just a fortnight's time we shall be celebrating God's ultimate demonstration of that triumph; the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ our Lord – the 'true light' of God.